Poised between hope and despair, today's youth glance at a world where a sudden flush of hope could bring about tears of elation and explosive love, whereas limiting their glance so the harrowing descent is only within a peripheral range will bring about the repression we all so cynically expect.
Apathy is on a rise-and-fall like the half-committed fat man on a diet. One day it's down; he checks the weight, he smiles. He is proud of himself.
The trend continues for a week until he decides to treat himself for keeping with his diet so well.
One treat leads to several. He checks his weight on day 10 and sees he's shot up past 300, and this disgusts him into the predicament we find ourselves in today: give in, what's the point? If he's going to die of cardiac arrest already he might as well eat everything he damn well feels like whenever he damn well feels like it.
Or, conversely... this disgust may make him gaze at himself in the mirror. He will notice his mistake. If he wants to live much longer, he has to stop playing his silly meritocratic games and start taking his salvation seriously. He stops with the 'gift mentality' and focuses on the truth.
One truth I find is brutally neglected in this day and age is one which fits with the above analogy very well: that you quite literally are what you eat (as well as drink, which should go without saying), and to watch how carelessly the entire Western population downs all kinds of food dosed with industrial-grade preservatives in complete awareness of its ambiguous chemistry is a good base upon which to measure the populations apathy in all regards to modern life. This is also reflected in the Western populations addiction to the 'forget-it-all' psychoactive known as alcohol; quite easily one of the most harmful of psychoactive drugs in a complete and rounded physiological sense (greatly harmful to all three facets of soul, body, and mind if taken in excess), alcohol is an expression of the Westerner's gaze into the dismal affairs of modernity with complete compassion quick to be repressed to maintain the moral and existential simplicity of carelessness (the worst kind of 'reckless abandon').
On the periphery of globalised indoctrination, the Arab Spring uprisings showcase humanity as a wholes desire to avoid the coming collapse. Within the beating heart of the West, however, these revolutions are approached from the point of academia and not practice. The interest resides, predominantly, in the 'University mentality' of mind which sees it all as a part of a history-book-in-progress, keeping it at arms length as nothing more than a conceptual curiosity like the ideological occurrence of the Second World War in retrospect.
To truly save the world, the Westerner needs to release. The Westerner needs to gaze at the flames on each arm and stop, drop, and roll.
To truly save the world, the blame has to be pointed backwards- inwards. Into the very soul of the rebel. Into the very heart of the fat-mans apathy. Look to yourself in the mirror and know that, as you fight capitalism, you fight a phantasm. You fight yourself.
And you can win the battle against your ideological obesity only if you're ready to give into that holy awareness and give up the 'gift mentality' of treating yourself with purchase.
None of us are several steps away from the world we study.
You are as real as the starving Ethiopian, the murdered Syrian, and the embattled Palestinian.
Let's save the world before the chest is seized in cardiac arrest because a new world has always been as possible the old.
